Low Latency Spending Chugs Along

Yesterday Greg MacSweeney at Wall Street & Technology wrote a story about continued robust spending in low latency spending. This reinforces the trend that we noted here a few weeks ago, that being that algorithmic activity is spreading rapidly from equities to options and FX. From the WS&T article:

Why is it so important in the options market? “Options is the epicenter of market data, with 2 billion messages a day, ” McPartland tells WS&T. “There are a lot of people executing high-speed options strategies.” With the Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA) recommending that market participants have the capacity to handle nearly 2 million messages a second (10 billion a day) by January 2009, simply handling all of that data is going to require firms to use technology that reduces latency in all parts of the process. (my emphasis)

These kinds of numbers are also behind the increasing interest in hardware solutions for handling the combination of high volume and low-latency. Software is notorious for requiring you to choose one or the other. Hardware middleware gives you both.